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Black-feathered bird, echo of an echo, made in the shape of a dead's man ever-present self-portrait. Born with blade in hand and purpose in mind, granted like a silver spoon on a prince's tounge. Sometimes you take it, and drive the blade into an innocent heart without thought; sometimes you cast it aside, and free her or discard her or slay her at her most vulnerable; sometimes you pause to thiink for a moment, and end up only the worse for it. Thought is something that does no one any good, here. To think is to change, and to change is to arm, and to arm is to place a blade to one's own throat.You are the Long Quiet. A nascent god, torn from your other half. Stasis and Change, soulmates in the way one old philosopher described it: he theorised that men were once in fused pairs, only to be split in half for their pride. Two legs, two arms, a single mind where once had been two in one (had been a harmony rather than a lonely tune). It describes the two of you well, you think.One half became the killer, and one half became the victim. A half to do the deed, and half to experience it, and yet you seem to have recieved the wrong script. She is Change, the Death within her multitudes that you were born to destroy existing within her many facets, but you are not something made to act, rather merely to act. A passive player, to experience rather than to do. And that is only the starts of how
you is warped like a misbehaving record, like a piece of plastic left to half-melt and bend, like a page of a book refolded into an origami piece. Incorrect, never meant to be. But it is.
"Are you still there?" She calls, voice keen and cruelly excited. "Are you still you?"The concept of you has always been flexible, here. She changes. You remain the same, in truth, no matter how many splinters dislodge from under your skin and whisper their advice in your ears. There is no end, and there is no beginning. What is you has been here for a long, long time, unceasing, unchanging, eternal in every way she is not, because she is all that you are not and you are all that She is not. Ragged edges cling to your nails, blood caught under them for as long as you have breathed, and you think that they have always been part of her.To be born, you killed her, and she killed you. Faster and faster you go. Ribbons of flesh, fractals of hands, fingers splitting like branches until one becomes two becomes ever-so-briefly-one becomes the binary stars gone supernova, one devouring the other. The two of you were born to hurt each other, and that is the one thing you have both always been good at. Centuries have passed, and you are both so very good at hurting each other, until the point where one of you breaks."Are you still there?" She calls, voice flagging and determinedly sharp. "Are you still you?"You have not been you for a very long time, you think. You are a god, the universe's canvas, and what she is pulling apart is strings of flesh with voices in its ears. What she is is the truth she really seeks, to find the mirror and be able to pull a coherent conclusion from its surface. Flesh and bone and blood of her desecrator, of her disappointment, of her failed salvation will not grant her her peace, and yet she keeps doing it. All she knows how to do is hurt. All either of you know is how to hurt, gravity pulling sharp edges to each other's surfaces.It has been such a very
long time. Universes should have died, universes should have been reborn. Protostar becomes main sequence becomes red giant becomes either supernova or white dwarf. The abyss takes all, and yet it hasn't, all of it frozen in amber as one is supposed to eat the other.There is no longer a you, and there is no longer a Her, not in the way that are supposed to matter. Creeks and candleflames where once were oceans and stars."Are you still there?" She calls, voice tired and miserably continuing. "Are you still you?"There is no right answer, none she wants, none that will end things, not now. She stretches you further. Your will flickers and dies, followed by your stubbornness, and eventually it is only your empathetic despair or the complete absence of life that lingers in your overstrung frame. She stretches you further. Will is no match for desperation, and strength is no match for a hatred that crosses the boundaries of self and other. There is no longer a self or an other. There is only her, and you, and flesh that wraps the plant in an endless loop of atomic ribbon.She is beyond help, now. In another life this could have been prevented, but death hasn't enough of a hold on you to make it meaningful.In another life a bottle breaks on the tile floor, and no one turns to watch it. In the centre of the hall, in the galaxy, two figures waltz through the ever-spinning cosmos. Binary stars, doomed to crash, doomed to go supernova as one within their cage, glassy walls holding in the light under the bushel. Saturn falsls and smashes to pieces on the floor, icy rings like broken jewels scattered everywhere underfoot. Someone falls. The dance continues.You spin. You dip her, watch her miles of ruffled skirt flare out like a peacock's tail, watch her drape gracefully into your clawed grasp. Scarlet lace flows gracefully from the collar of her dress in thick ribbons, her necklace glinting in the low light. Your script demands many things of you in this moment, the part of the avenging warrior and the part of the dashing hero: you think the two sound incompatible, but they are not. You sink a knife into your lover's heart, bleed out beside her when your own heart takes its revenge, and then you listen to insensate love and loveless sense bicker. Or maybe you listen to loveless sense and senseless curiosity not-argue - the scenes do blur into each other after a while.The tide rises. The fire sears it all away like the touch of the sun.Moon and sun, spinning in a cosmic dance, tearing in two at the hands of the last call. The curtain falls, only to rise again. It falls, and it rises, title cards and declarations and narration: actors make their way through, cold and hunted and paranoid and skeptical and smitten and a half-dozen more besides, and again the waves take them all away. The audience gives a final hand, and the leading lady takes her a bow.Blood spills gently onto the floorboards of the stage, creaky with age and neglect. The leading lady is held aloft, chest flayed open, heart beating a dirge under a gentle palm, fingers ever-so-carefully fondling the nails holding open her flesh.
"What do you think of this vessel?""This one is-"Hearts, pounding and silent alike. Bright, deep, cautious, clever, joyful and driven, kaleidoscope variations of a single soul, reflected through a thousand fists for eternity. Both of you's outer edges lie ragged from a split neither of you can remember, but perhaps parts of you linger in her and vice-versa. You in the things that stay the same: femininity, the braided hair, the crown. Her in the shards of you that, when pulled out of your dying flesh, speak their pieces, always trying to pull you down one pathway or another. Yin and yang. Sun and moon, torn out of the waltz and cast to the ballroom floor.Everyone is staring. She is gone. You are nothing at all, no matter how many gazes have been cast upon you to pin you down. A net is only as strong as its weakest threads, and only then if it can hold what it has captured - and you are so much more than something that can be caged.Glass shatters across infinite planes. You stretch out, carefully, painfully, voices ringing in your ears as the Construct breaks with a sonourous splintering, world's worth of glass breaking from the single motion of a god.You look upon eternity, dying stars held in careful stasis. In the amber of her torment. Sometimes the pieces of you hate you, remembering your cruelty in the face of their end - more often they remember the kindness you cannot help but show, pieces of you bobbing in the tide of helpless black infinity.The construct breaks upon your back and Her careful touch, a universe's worth of feathery wings and a universe's worth of soft-skinned hands reaching out to embrace all that still is, apart from where yet more reach out to embrace the other. Yin and Yang, sun and moon, sky and stars: you have been torn in two, you and Her, and cannot bring yourselves to be apart again. At your too-clingy touch She smiles back at you, and you pull infinite claws and feathers and pitch-black wings into something resembling fondness in response. Once upon a time she ate you whole. Once upon a time you drove a blade into your own heart to kill her, but She does not hold your helpless spite against you.Change takes a breath, and Stasis echoes it, both blooming into what was taken from them; the creek has been refilled, and the tide laps at the shore."It has been so long, and my heart has ached for this moment.""I missed you."An endless cascade of smiles in response to words that are truthful every time, whether you remember that or not.A fight begins. A dance begins, a graceful tarentella-waltz with a thousand blades in hand, and a half-dozen lifetimes lived to argue your points. She has wanted for nothing. She has wanted for everything. She has only wanted to go home, away from the icy chill of the basement that swallowed her whole. Bestial and cruel and lovely, she has only ever wanted to go home, no matter the cost. And home was never Here, within these walls, within the glassy prison that holds both you and Her like ornaments in a glass bauble, insects within a terrarium jar. She wants to be free. You will not leave until she understand what you have to say, and so the fight goes on. Supernova versus the space it explodes into - who will win the fight, and will anyone truly say it was worth it?You drive a knife into her heart - hearts - your own, beating a tarantella in your feathery chest - hurl it on the window, hearing it land with a satisfying thwack in the arm of one of the thousands of Her. The stairs are gentle, except for when they are not, and except for when they spiral into infinity until you finally arrive in the basement. She is kind. She is harsh. She is a half-dozen paths in a single chimera, eyes a thousand feelings at once as she look at you.Because that is the secret, isn't it? She is a thousand things because she is a reflection, and she will keep hurting you as long as you think she will, and you will keep hurting her as long as you think you will. Can. Should, or a thousand other reasons to pounce and sink a steel claw into a thousand-temperamented heart. She is a mirror, and so are you. Kaleidoscope fractals, spiralling outwards for eternity, pieces ragged and lights colourful as they refract through your thousand-facted forms. Rainbows through shadow, paint splattered across an infinite canvas. Incomplete facades are torn away until she is only a paper-thin Potemkin of herself, and she eats away the layers of you until you are only purpose - a blade, or a key. Death in a thousand words whether she escapes or fails.The Echo fades away over time, the Creator's last request in your ears as you hold the shattered pieces of him in your claws. He wants you to kill Change itself. He wants you to do the impossible, unless you have hurt her enough times that you can turn all of You against Her, feathers against gentle fractalling flesh. Soft fingers cradle your beak. You have hurt them so badly that they have flayed themselves, a wet slap when degloved skin hit the tile and sharpened bone came rushing for you.Again the storm breaks. You kill each other, as you were meant to, faster and faster. The tempo increases. Footwork, hand on the other's hip and shoulder, dress and cloak and hair and feathers, steel glinting in each other's hands, too busy watching the shine of metal to notice the knives being raised. Watch one hand, lose the other. Apologising changes nothing. Her voice is soft, and harsh, and infinitely layered in fractal patterns, and she is everything that you are not, dark and cruel and over-soft thing. Passion lies within difference, potential difference part of the beating heart of an unknowable energy, the numerical soul of existence. Pulsing through marrow and nerves to bring life to humble flesh, the flickering pain of existence as the final words of the play are spoken."I love you."Then the curtain falls, because that is the ultimate truth of this tale: that love is the point of it all, the ultimate purpose. A love story through and through. The pattern has been woven, and love is what it was made from from start to finish. Except you are not a creature of love, although it exists within your many planes: distill a single atom of love from the unfathomable number that makes you up and then you will believe in it, but until then...was it love when she drove her sharpened bones into your neck? When her sharp teeth bit you clean in half, your intestines dripping from her terrible mouth? Every time she hurt you, was it love?Was it love when a knife sank into your breast across a thousand lives? Was it love when you ate her and she ate you, nest of things devouring inside a nest of things devouring, acid burning your flesh and claws tearing open hers? Was it love when eternity met change and tore it open like a frog on the dissection table, flayed its heart open for the whole world to look upon?(But you know what she has to say about that, don't you, when she tore you apart piece by piece in turn? The most terrifying thing of all is to be seen, but worse is not to be.)What are you saying? Of course it was. Violence and passion are the silk from which intimacy is woven and to love is an act of violence, because the final law of the universe is that something always ends first. One of you will always leave first, even when it comes to gods, even from the tinest speck of a quark to the eternity-spanning feathers of your wings. Someone leaves first.But that - flux et reflux, bodies in motion continuing until collision, the fact of ending - it is only truth, only necessity outside of the box. The pain is how you know you are still alive, and you are a stillborn refusing to breathe, blue and cold and still on the universe's floor. Here you will think. and it will be true. In truth you don't think you're ready for true consequence, and it lies in question if you will ever be, protostar rotating constantly until all the flames of your birth die out into white-hot wasted potential. That would't be a bad way to go out, you think. To simply exist until you die. She said she was not afraid to die, because she had never truly lived; you are afraid to die because you have never truly lived. You simply aren't ready. And you may never be, half-formed god afraid to pull the wool off of their eyes.When you asked what she thought you were, she said, "I think you are a thing like me."In the sense she meant, she was entirely correct: oceans reduced to shallow creeks, solitary lights in empty cities, things that stay in a way that people simply don't. But in every other way, she was wrong. You are the moon to her sun, the canvas to her paint, the dark to her blinding radiance. She is the stars and you are the byss of space. The Shifting Mound is not afraid to exist, but the Long Quiet is, and so it keeps all of you safely within your terrarium, allowing this cosmic dance to go on and on and on and keep all of reality in stasis. Frozen in amber, fossilised until it will finally be found. Only time, if such a thing exists anymore, can tell.She sinks a blade into your heart, and you whisper the truth to her tear-stained face. In another life it would be the kindest words you could say to her, and in others the cruelest: an assurance of the inescapable gravity of your orbit, or the softest words of affection your harsh voice could speak.You will see her again, when the curtain rises once more and all the actors return to their places. The same old faces, the same old sets, the same old lines except for when improvisation carries you into a new reality, and you do not think you can ever stop. The Construct lives, and the masked visage of your other half calls you out for the coward you are. She loves you, always, and you think you always love her, as is your shared cosmic role.And yet, through everything, only one thing is always, irrestibly true. Event horizon, where the stage resets. The title card reads out The Hero and the Princess and you are where you are meant to be.You are on a path in the woods, and at the end of that path is a cabin. And inside that cabin is a princess.If you do not slay her, it will be the end of the world.